A world without honeybees would also mean a world without fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Nearly one-third of the world’s crops are dependent on honeybees for pollination, but over the last decade the black-and-yellow insects have been dying at unprecedented rates both in the United States and abroad. Pesticides, disease, parasites, poor weather, and the stress of being trucked from orchard-to-orchard to pollinate different crops all play a role in the decline of managed honeybee populations. A lack of bees threatens farmers who depend on these nectar- and pollen-eating animals for their pollination services. We have few planned defenses against a honeybee disaster. The Farm Bill, passed on June 10, 2013, allocates less than $2 million a year in emergency assistance to honeybees. “The bottom line is, if something is not done to improve honeybee health, then most of the interesting food we eat is going to be unavailable,” warns Carlen Jupe, secretary and treasurer for the California State Beekeepers Association. Honeybees as a species are not in danger of extinction, but their ability to support the industry of commercial pollination, and by extension, a large portion of our food supply, is in serious danger. Whole Foods recently imagined what our grocery store would like in a world without bees by removing more than half of the market’s produce. Here, we also take a purely hypothetical look at how the human diet and lifestyle would change if honeybees and other bee pollinators disappeared from our planet one day. This is the worst case scenario — it’s possible that human ingenuity and alternate pollinators can mitigate some of these outcomes, but not necessarily all of them. If bees dies, beekeepers who make their living by managing bee colonies will go out of business.

Plants survived without bees for millions of years, plus bees, like all species that humans farm, are majorly over-represented in terms of eco-sustainability, a convenience, not a necessity, & “soon”? Ok, an example, in australia there are stingless native bees, tiny by comparison to those apiarists farm, almost wiped out by the theft of the pollens by the honey bees, yet making much better use of the environment that they evolved in than the imported varieties, those native bees seem unaffected, in fact they appear to be starting to thrive again, i’ve rarely seen them below the hot northern latitudes in 5decades, yet over the past half decade i’ve observed them in huge numbers throughout the south-west, 1000 miles further south than i’ve ever found them before, so, THAT “soon”.